Judith Butler as a Public Intellectual
I’m a bit late to the party on this article in New York about Judith Butler, which was making the rounds last week. But it’s got me thinking, again, about public intellectuals and their style of writing, a topic I addressed earlier this year in The Chronicle Review.
Now, I should confess at the outset that I’m a rank amateur when it comes to queer theory and gender studies. I read, and know, about it from a distance: from friends like Paisley Currah, from my students, and from colleagues in real life and on social media. So forgive me—and happily correct me—if what I am about to say is wrong.
The premise of the New York profile is that Butler was/is the theoretician of our contemporary politics (and culture) of sex and gender, even as that politics and culture have surpassed her in certain ways.
Taking into account that there were many writers and theoreticians who have contributed to our contemporary sensibilities and mores around sex and gender; acknowledging that none of these theories would have become remotely actual were it not for the millions of people, activists and non-activists alike, who worked to make the world more hospitable to the claims of the non-gender-conforming—the article still presumes that much in our world today would be inconceivable were it not for Butler’s original intervention in Gender Trouble. That’s the premise of the article I take to be true.
I don’t mean that to sound as if I don’t believe it to be true, though I recognize that it presumes a problematic narrative of the “Hero Theorist” who makes the world what it is. I just mean that for my purposes, it’s a necessary premise for what I really want to argue.
What struck me in reading the New York piece is that for much of the 1990s, Gender Trouble led a second, or shadow, life in the republic of letters. Where it was received, often nastily, less as a document in our ongoing arguments about sex and gender and more as an instance of Bad Writing. The article references that controversy over Butler’s writing style—a style that could be characterized as strenuous, I think it’s fair to say—but it doesn’t quite capture how heated and vicious the controversy often was.
In a famous essay, Martha Nussbaum flayed Butler for her writing style. And thousand of others did, too. Not just in lengthy articles, but in everyday conversation. (I’m sure I did, too; Butler’s style was not my own.)
The assumption of so many of those attacks—it ran through Nussbaum’s like a red thread—was that Butler’s style of writing was a betrayal of not just the philosophical vocation but of the public intellectual vocation: the vocation to speak to the issues of the day in a style that was as demotic as it was democratic. Nothing was thought to be so emblematic of Butler’s political un-seriousness—of her failure to speak to the polis—as the hermetic style of her prose. It was a prose for the initiated and the elect, not for everyday men and women.
Yet here we are today: an entire polity and culture awash, saturated, in Judith Butler’s ideas. From the President to pop culture, “It’s Judith Butler’s World,” as the piece’s URL title puts it. Butler has gone on to write eminently readable opeds (in defense of difficult writing, no less) in the New York Times, make brave interventions in the debate over Israel/Palestine, and pen learned essays on Kafka and Jewish identity in tony venues like the London Review of Books. Yet, a quarter-century later, it is Gender Trouble—that difficult, knotty, complicated book, with a prose style that violates all the rules of Good Public Writing—that has generated the largest public or publics of all: the queer polity we all live in today.
All of which is to say, it’s not the style that makes the writing (and the intellectual) public. It’s not the audience. It’s the aspiration to create an audience—and, with any luck (and it is luck, as Bonnie Honig and Lida Maxwell have reminded me), the actuality of having done so.
Judith Butler has done so.
As I wrote back in January:
Though the public intellectual is a political actor, a performer on stage, what differentiates her from the celebrity or publicity hound is that she is writing for an audience that does not yet exist. Unlike the ordinary journalist or enterprising scholar, she is writing for a reader she hopes to bring into being. She never speaks to the reader as he is; she speaks to the reader as he might be. Her common reader is an uncommon reader.
The reason for this has less do with the elitism of the intellectual — mine is no brief for an avant garde or philosopher king — than with the existence, really, the nonexistence, of the public. Publics, as John Dewey argued, never simply exist; they are always created. Created out of groups of people who are made and mangled by the actions of other people. Capital acts upon labor, subjugating men and women at work, making them miserable at home. Those workers are not yet a public. But when someone says — someone writes — “Workers of the world, unite!,” they become a public that is willing and able to act upon its shared situation. It is in the writing of such words, the naming of such names — “Workers of the world” or “We, the People,” even “The Problem That Has No Name” — that a public is summoned into being. In the act of writing for a public, intellectuals create the public for which they write.
This is why the debate over jargon versus plain language is, in this context, misplaced. The underlying assumption of that debate is that the public is simply there, waiting to be addressed. The academic philosopher with his notorious inaccessibility — say, Adorno — obviously has no wish to address the public; the essayist with his demotic presence and proficiency — say, Hazlitt — obviously does. Yet both Adorno and Hazlitt spoke to audiences that did not exist but which they hoped would come into being. Adorno, explicitly: “Messages in a Bottle” was the title of 10 fragments he meant to include in Minima Moralia. In Hazlitt’s case, as Stefan Collini has argued, the
“familiar style,” which was to serve as something of a model for later generations of critics who aspired to recreate a “lost” intimacy with an educated readership, was consciously adopted as a voice that was not appropriate to the new age; it was an attempt to refashion a mode of address to the reader that was already felt to be archaic.
Whatever the style, the public intellectual is always speaking to an audience that is not there.
Of all our contemporary academics with claims to the title of public intellectual, Judith Butler is the first among equals.